Champion of Mars Read Online Free PDF

cut the thick metal shield at an angle, and it falls away. A man stands in his saddle, pistol out. Yoechakenon removes it along with the arm holding it. Blood gouts high, and the man falls.
    Chaos descends on the shield cannon wall as the spirit senses defeat and withdraws its direction. Some men remain, refocusing their fire upon the advancing army, making good use of their final few moments. Others flee. Hearts brave and craven both are stilled by Yoechakenon. He moves up and over the battery as relentless as death itself.
    The army reaches the toppled wall, the soft mess of its ruin impeding their advance. Some struggle, a couple scream as their feet break the crust and plunge into the molten stuff beneath to cook inside their armour. Defenders stationed in the wallside towers fell many of them, but they are quickly hunted out by men streaming into the wall interior, or wiped from existence by redirected sun cannon. And then the Kemmeans are into the city, running free, virtually unopposed. They set about their atrocity.
    A rumble. A wide section of wall tumbles, several hundred spans from the first breach. Sun cannon have seared the walls of defensive weapons; only a few remain to answer the barrage, and they are silenced. Two further breaches open, and the commanders of the artillery are ordered by the Decarch general to alter their targets. The energy wall goes out, and the Second World is full of the sound of spirits howling in pain as the spires they occupy are bombarded. In ages past, this would never have happened.
    Mankind has fallen low. Olm burns.
    I cease my counting, sickened. Let the Quinarchs kill me if they will, I am done with their business for today. I will follow my love instead. I drive the dust of my body over the walls, and into the inferno.
    Yoechakenon sprints through streets I see as a progression of horrific tableaux, the lights of fires reflecting from his armour and turning him into a living flame. He ignores the screams of women as their children and clothes are torn from them. Men run to and fro, giddy with survival, helmets folded back. The fire in their eyes is not a reflection. Windows break and masonry tumbles. Old men are cut down in the street, old men waveringly holding swords, old men proffering their worldly goods or offering their children. Old men on their knees. None are shown mercy. Boys are slaughtered where they stand. I force my attention away as a soldier below me tosses a squirming babe into a fire, laughing as his mother screams. Only the women live, and then only for a short, excruciating while.
    Olm has defied the Twin Emperor, and now it pays the price.
    Ancient buildings, grown in the old way, twist and shriek as their guardian spirits die and their flesh burns from them. Stone cracks and shatters in the heat. Yoechakenon leaps, many times his own height, as a tumble of building bones clatter down from a spire, flattening the cruder constructions around it. Each of the spires that dies is a mind gone, each an artefact of better times lost forever. I would weep, but my emotional buffers are still operational. I leave them that way; I could not stand it were it otherwise.
    The remnants of the Olmish army retreat into the citadel, a soaring, proud spire made of many lesser spires. The palace of its prince, and the home of the city’s First Spirefather. The soldiers run on, grim-faced under their armour as they ignore the screams of their neighbours, abandoning the outer city to the unkindnesses of defeat.
    They are unaware of Yoechakenon as he runs. In the havoc and the flames, he is invisible. They are lucky, for he has no time to cut them down. He is intent on the main gate of the citadel, a gate that will close within seconds. Kemmean soldiers follow, those who have not cast themselves into the rape of the city. They open fire as they reach the rearguard of the Olmish, and the retreat turns into stumbling defence, then a rout. Bolts of energy and projectiles sketch a